ABSTRACT
Decried as a symbol of all that was wrong with British industrial relations, the motor industry, or at least the rump which had been taken into public control in the 1970s, has since the 1990s appeared in the vanguard of ‘social partnership’ (Employment Committee 1994). For Rover – or more so its precursors – worker mobilisation was associated with walkouts and mass meetings at the factory gate. After decades of turbulent relations, shop stewards and management there now appear in a rapprochement. The most recent public demonstration by Longbridge workers through Birmingham’s streets was to promote the buy-out by Phoenix, a consortium established by Rover’s ex-management after owner BMW announced the sale of this element of what had become known as its ‘English Patient’ (Chinn and Dyson 2000). This is in marked contrast to 1979, when management pioneered the ‘symbolic defeat’ (Hyman 2001c: 105) of unions with the sacking of the AEUW convenor at Longbridge (Claydon 2000). Derek Robinson’s unceremonious removal, coinciding with the first Thatcher government, represented the beginning of a major shift in the climate of British industrial relations. It was a direct attack on the heartland of ‘militant unionism’ with an emergent ‘managers’ right to manage’ (Edwardes 1983) and proved to be the first attack in an escalating assault on unions (Kelly 1998; see also Smith and Morton 1993). Such developments, perhaps the demobilisation of the ‘symbolic mass worker’ towards the end of the twentieth century (Hyman 2001c: 31), pose an important case for assessing fluctuations in employer-employee relations in the last quarter of the twentieth century.
